GLIMPSES OF THE MIND

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Llinas' and Crick and Koch's concepts, speculative though they may be, are at least firmly rooted in biology. But you don't have to be a biologist or a neuroscientist to play the consciousness game: the mystery is intriguing enough so that researchers from a wide variety of scientific disciplines have jumped in with their own ideas. Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose, for example, argues that consciousness may arise from quantum mechanics, of all things, the same process that governs the behavior of subatomic particles.

Computer scientists come at the problem from a different direction. The mind is something like a parallel-processing computer, they argue, and consciousness is simply the coordinated signal-processing of individual "agents." These agents, described as simple computer programs, sound a bit like the Damasios' convergence zones. Computer scientists and neuroscientists seem to be arriving at theories that look, in some ways, very similar.

Does this mean that science is on the verge of understanding consciousness? Not necessarily. San Diego's Churchland compares the search for answers to a canoe trip into the wilderness. Every time the canoe rounds a bend in the river, the landscape changes. She believes the journey has barely begun and that there are bound to be surprises in store. Certainly, science has finally started to shed light on a puzzle that is not just abstract and philosophical, but intimately familiar to anyone who gives it a moment's thought. But as physicist Penrose has suggested, the notion that the human mind can ever fully comprehend the human mind could well be folly. It may be that scientists will eventually have to acknowledge the existence of something beyond their ken-something that might be described as the soul.

--Reported by J. Madeleine Nash/Iowa City, Alice Park/New York and James Willwerth/West Haven